Effectiveness defined
- Reduce text size Decrease text size
- Increase text size Increase text size
- Print article Print
- Jump to comments Comment
- Share this article Share
- Email article to a friend Email
Information Age readers spell out the technologies and strategies that work - and those that dont.
After a decade of racing to apply new systems and technologies to meet spiralling business requirements, IT managers today face a tougher challenge. Business is not so much asking for less IT as 'effective IT' that delivers more. IT managers have not just spent the last two years devising new IT strategies, they have also been dusting off policies that were forgotten or neglected in the growth years.
One of the clearest patterns to emerge from Information Age's Effective IT Survey is that, for many organisations, realising more effective IT means getting back to basics. The recent survey looked at 30 strategies broken down over six
| ||
Of the six strategies most commonly adopted by the survey's 332 respondents, three of them are 'Manage for value' strategies where the emphasis is placed squarely on the role of management rather than that of technology, and two other strategies from the category appear in the leading selections.
One of these strategies, 'reducing projects to smaller stages', was cited by 85% of all respondents, making it the most widely chosen strategy of all by some margin, and a strong indicator of the more inhibited and cost-conscious thinking that is pervading IT today.
After 'Manage for value', one other category in particular - 'Use known cost-killers' - stood out as featuring the most widely adopted strategies. Of these 'remote and/or mobile working' was second overall, adopted by 80% of respondents, whilst 'use low-cost hardware' and 'use mid-tier software vendors' both featured in the top 10. But two hyped cost-killers, 'use open source software' and 'use a service-orientated architecture', were adopted by only 35% and 30%.
In terms of overall adoption levels, perhaps the most surprising aspect of the survey is the poor performance of outsourcing. Of this category, only telecoms outsourcing scraped into the top 20, and the rest, including the strategy of offshore contracting, featured at the foot of the popularity table.
Of course, the popularity rankings of effective IT strategies tell us more about the motivation of their adopters than the success of the strategies themselves. With the exceptions of 'remote and/or mobile working' and 'server/data centre consolidation', none of the top 10 are high-ticket investments, and most of them are geared more to saving money than delivering improved services. Are they also the most effective strategies? According to the survey, not necessarily.
Of those who opted to 'preserve and invest in legacy systems', for instance, 14% ranked the strategy 'completely ineffective'. Tellingly, those who chose to cut staff and pay levels, the eleventh most popular strategy overall, enjoyed mixed results. As many as 16% ranked the strategy completely ineffective, and 29% reported 'no discernable impact'.
